Cosmicus

Tonight those remaining here in the land hub seventeen-and-three-quarter months subsequent to the disappearance of all the Jesuits in their red coats and boots, reached for Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and for the first time brought up nothing but the bile and impotent bluster we’ve maybe not up until now seen for what they are in the grimy green light of our interstellar squat, working conditions appropriate for a poxed wombat with gnarly feral gaze. Bethany-Jane and I went out in a bustle cube and we used an anthracite pad to film and rapidly edit footage of sherbet moraines, blue and purple blister systems with peripheral (distinctly yellow) stellar collapse, and late in the day and for almost three hours a great winding and cascading sweep of very red raspberry globules and sheets. We’re shooting and dropping video like perched hyperactive boll weevils in a barren rocky wasteland trying to text for emergency assistance. Precisely what I imagine it would look like to the satellites. Ha ha, maybe we should ask Andy. I’lI bet he’s wanking his gizzard like a filthy old wizard. Good luck, Goldilocks, with your golden-locked crotch box and pitiful indifferent coin toss. I bet you five Canadian Goonies that Oksekopov and Bloomsbury have you tied up in the infirmary presently, a turkey baster up your keister, Bethany-J-J, if you don’t stop spraying our videos all around, sitting atop sixteen tons of old scrap space metal, earbuds in your ears and feet dangling, cascading translucent ambient phenomena casting you in relief against blackness and bursts of disorienting colour pulse patters from out of the aether itself. 

Bethany-Jane just had the first of three children it has been ordained that we shall have between us. The orbiting mollusk shines on us luckily…and with a chipped tooth…even more lucky. One question neither Bethany-Jane nor myself nor any of the sorry souls remaining ever thought to ask: if a stapler runs out of staples in outer space does anybody hear? Now we’re all here, dangling our cocks like sad, unemployed cobras. Bethany-Jane has no complaint, primary sex characteristics aside—I supply the proper manwork steady and she is eager to receive the brunt of my secret animal lust. I myself am absolved from the requirement of delivering babies, but I could definitely tell that the whole process caused Bethany-Jane too much anguish and suffering to suit her at all. I hope she’s able to get into the swing of things. 

We are no longer drawing enough solar power to run the teleportation equipment. We’re going to have to get everywhere like sullen donkeys, time consuming and arduous, the delirium of endless dull space, dragging our meagre riches unto instant depreciation, the mirages swallowing us alive whole, good and slow. Luckily I am the Peter Pan of sunspots!

During the birth of our third child, Vincent XI9091, Bethany-Jane grew outright surly and even called me a "pipsqueak." I fired back, saying that children had rotted her from the inside and transformed her into a miserable, cosmonaut dyke and with the hideous manners of same. For a while she cut her hair like a boy and dressed like a boy, in homage to her hero Joan of Arc, who she's always spying on using the aethernet monitors aligning the crater the kids in topoanalysis call Big Zep. I bet we'll soon wish we hadn't have put anything of value there, like we're sporting a gigantic sombrero and just asking for it. The Arcade that Challenged God and Got it's Bluff Called. The truth is nobody knows what Bethany-Jane is doing. She took off twelve days ago. With any luck she'll get one of the old synthetic wormholes running on its own residues and make a fortuitous bounce somewhere vaguely hospitable. 

We're bushwhacking it in the Beryl, Station Wagon-like space tech prone to mechanical failure. It's me, Oksekopov, Bloomsbury, Xi, Dieng, Middlemarch, Touré, Andy, Crenshaw, Konyukhova, Kozakov, Kozák, and Bulff. That's about twice as many people as you'd usually want aboard one of these rickety-ass things. Anyway, we're aimed at Mars and Oksekopov is confident we're going to get there. I'm both excited and nervous. I'm about to meet Elon Musk for the first time. Or at least whatever is left of him after all that plastic surgery.

- Hello, Mr. Musk. It is an honour to finally make your acquaintance. I dare say it was worth the brutal trip, you see...

- Shut the fuck up. You are Jeb Weirdbüch, correct? Do you know that you are almost 500? You need to consider the possibility that they're just going to shut you off and delete you when you are 500. I am looking at your statistical output and I am very much making the determination that you are not running worth a damn or for any good reason. You're out of season, Bildungsroman. I'm not any more sensible with the bitches than you are, I can't front, but do you honestly not know where the mother of your three children, the final child making good on our most ancient and pressing prophecy...

 

- The children are with nannies...well, robots...

- Do you honestly not know where your formerly beloved has gone? If I ran businesses the way you run your idiot self there would be no flourishing Tesla Plantation on the not-in-the-end-so-Red Planet. I date widely across all the known planets and I plant my seed wither I wilt. Business and girls work best if you are a bulldozer...if you know what I mean. Another productive day bulldozing over my colleagues, gonna wind down by combing the carpets for crack...

- You are truly a master.

- You said it, Jeb. There is no measure for the universe as seen by somebody as unprecedented as me. Please don't try to make me out to resemble anything, you'll only manage to make yourself look the fool. Since I was a boy I've had the same dream and I think it means I am to be handsome and lavish in my public martyrdom, really taking my time and relishing it, like Trump when he was almost shot or whatever. It was like he was submerged in molasses. Do you remember beautiful Charlie Kirk and how he was martyred? Man, it was so fucking beautiful. Shot in the neck casual as you like. I watched it on repeat for days. Charlie would have been so proud. I mean it, I think he would have been happy to have gone that way.

- Mr. Musk, can you tell me anything about upcoming grain yields that I can take to my people?

- Nothing good.  

I have a small cot on the orbital and the kids and Bethany-Jane are all here. Unless none of this is real. Right? It could be that kind of orbital. I could be a veritable tape loop. The future prerogatives are coming in but they may not find living people or functional robots to receive them. In this barely-paid and labour intensive work—workcamp work, really — I feel myself Superman, Master of Planetoids, and the lovely lady and her satiny cervix call out to me still even more I think than if I were a young man. I almost wish I had never met Elon Musk. When I think back upon him I see a plaster cast of our collective ruin, and I immediately become reluctant to head too far out into outer space. 

I don't care if they delete me when I'm 500 or 5000. I don't have any damn clue when that is! Just drop me and send some robots to gather up the parts, in and out, Bob's your uncle. I want my last thought cut-off mid-thought, and if the Jesuits were still here I'd say that to 'em...boast of it, even. I shall enter paradise swinging for the bleachers. I'm the only half-competent advocate I ever had.

In considering the martyrdom of the weird earthmen, I notice a certain poetry in the wobbly, living élan of those who shift rapidly from normal boring day to...oh, no, what the fuck? Then you can zoom in even more until the best weapon in the world will no longer be able to hit the barn door. Bethany-Jane has been reading Nietzsche's Twilight of Idols to the children who are attentive and engaged. These little fuckers are going to be a problem. Here is little Austin ZX88779, eager, pulling at my sleeve. Pappa, pappa, pappa. What is it, by God, you wolfish little man? Pappa, one needn't worry of suffering at the hand of a worthy adversary... Adorable. Ha ha. Got my eye on you, you little fucker. Just like his dad.  

Anyway, all glory unto God. I fit with my brood like a pea in its pod. 

In perpetuity,

Jeb Weirdbüch

Emotional Weather

The Hurricane (John Ford, 1937)

Passion (Jean-Luc Godard, 1982)

In reflecting upon the passage of time I take a little side quest to consider the gradual if not to say glacial transformation of an animate soul into some other thing that consummates either the bliss or the ruin of its lived existence by way of a climactic or anti-climactic death, all but certain. If change is happening gradually but also all day long everyday, there might very well be separate tempos operating here. People with mood and mental health disorders might be especially well situated to start charting topographical seasons of mood over the long haul (in the manner of Friedrich Nietzsche). I had a psychiatrist who felt absolutely swamped in the fall as all his patients started coming in with debilitating depressions. It is in the overall mood set-up of an individual and the broader-range mood patterns that we might recognize something like climate, whereas the fluctuations and turbulence of daily emotions and psychic states testify to the bracing immediacy of all kinds of different local weather. I am more inclined to think that so-called ‘empaths’ and people with one degree or another of extrasensory perception might be more appropriately conceptualized as “weathervanes.” As a molecular, earthly creature fielded in cosmological opacity and existential groundlessness, the weathervane knows one thing for sure that we can articulate without too much difficulty: The weathervane experiences within it what it also knows is going on around it. If you want to work on your mood and your mind states it is definitely advisable that you practice active awareness daily, intransigently, even when looking at the world around you is once big colossal toothache . 

The reality of human life on earth: a growing baroque mess typified above all in the field of Homo sapiens by robotic busyness and gestural reproductivity plus panicked insularity and bitter defensiveness. There is no change because change has no fresh network to plug into. You can’t be hasty or impatient. We can thank Slavoj Žižek for the gentle reminder that it is after all possible that the actual victory of the Arab Spring of late 2010 just hasn’t arrived yet. In his last couple books philosopher, activist, and minor European media celebrity Franco ‘Bifro’ Beradi repeatedly comes close to inadvertently producing a new ‘binary apparatus' of which we ourselves should feel no need to make use. In bemoaning the total dissolution and pan-institutional calamity of 21st century human life, Berardi points to pandemics of depression (addiction, suicide, declining birthrates) and psychosis (mass shootings, political hysteria, xenophobic violence). We cannot argue that these are not prevailing trends. We all know it to be so. The implication is that those who lean to the left of centre will statistically be more depressive-tending and those on the right of the spectrum will tend statistically to being less or more psychotic. Alas, anybody who is living with me on the actual surface of the earth right now—to an approximation of an inch—knows there’s more colours and noise than that in the tempestuous weather out here. I see the overall situation as atomized rather than polarized. We are living in the story of the Tower of Babel and paralysis will not get us to safety. 

For philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his 2017 book The Scent of Time, just as the nose might catch a whiff of something and instantaneously make close contact with the vivd and pulsing eternal singularity of the thing in question, the critical eye “goes easy on things.” What do you bring to the table every workday if not your very sensory-motor equipment? Oughtn’t we be mindful of and tend to our gear? The cumbersome nature of the body and of our perceptual equipment means that we are all sort of potential threats to ourselves and others every day. We get to make mistakes because we don’t get not to make them. “A crowd of facts came upon me with accompanying pressure in the chest,” observes the ever-pressurized bipolar maven Henderson in Saul Bellow’s 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King. And here with its bravura closing bisexually-coloured hazes, from our dear Percy Shelley [hash smoker], along with James Deen our ultimate brooding emblem to rude fate courted:

The hurricane came from the west, and passed on

By the path of the gate of the eastern sun,

Transversely dividing the stream of the storm

That’s from “A Vision of the Sea.” I think it means that sometimes you reap the whirlwind...and the other way around. Wait a second...I think I'm a little confused here...

This was never supposed to be about the complementarity of opposites!  

Why I'm Not Going to Kill Myself and You Shouldn't Either

In the experimental and deeply personal essay-documentary The Joy of Life (2005)—a work of grief, drift, and creative synthesis—filmmaker Jenni Olson explores the lengthy and disturbingly busy history of people taking their own lives by leaping from San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. One fact leaps out at me above all others: though only a very tiny number of people have ever survived the plummet and impact, they all unanimously report that on the way down they wished they hadn't jumped.

At a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility in San Clemente, California, in 2006, one of the inpatients had concealed a credit card upon admission and one night not too long into his stay in residential treatment he left—shortly after sunset—and got some beer and whisky and went to go kill himself in a hotel toilet. The truly chilling thing was that he died in the hotel lobby...trying to get help.

I overdosed on heroin in 2003, turning blue and the whole deal, so I know how easy and unfussy a way to go that is...should they fail to resuscitate you. I feel like guns are much worse than intentional drug overdoses. With a gun you really can kill yourself so fast you almost don't even have to think about it. I am not ever going to own a gun though we did have them when I was growing up (my father was fastidious about storage protocols). And I've been mostly off hard drugs since 2003. I wouldn't know where to cop smack for the life of me. I'd have to go hang out outside the homeless shelter where I used to work and wait for an Artful Dodger to lead me down the emerald path.

What the world really actually needs is prayer and meditation, with also actually means tenderness, care, and the daily interrogations of ones own presumptions and prejudices that allow one to grow and foster better connections, even if just at the level of the nerve fibres. It's mostly the former drunks and dopers who go to great lengths to live this way, unreservedly, on a daily basis. Yes, they have a second lease on life, the twelve-steppers, but it is conditioned by abyssal foresight and grievous suffering. Hope and wonder will keep a soul alive and drawing breath, come what may. I bet on it, and not any more lavishly than does my main motherfuckin' man, Blaise Pascal, may he rest in power.

   

Our Lady of the Calendaric

 

1937

1983

2025

It would have been hard to avoid seeing the mixture of desire and concern in her eyes.

Writ across that whole mooning face with the eyes merely the most destabilizing component.

Maybe this is a new constellation in the heavens.

They say they've built a propulsion system that defies the known laws of physics. 

I need to stick around on the earth long enough to procure my own synthetic black hole, stored in an anonymous warehouse somewhere relatively accessible. 

Southeast Calgary?

xoxo

J

Three Drawings

Nothing has happened, been resolved, decided.

- Rosmarie Waldrop, The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter 

In the end, the doctor was an idiot but like I read somewhere, the idiots are also victims.

- Chantal Akerman, My Mother Laughs 

Golden Boy

Armed Robbery

Her Reaction

UIQ

I suspect that most people who come to A Love of UIQ are already more or less familiar with Félix Guattari from the standpoint of his theoretical work, hands-on expertise in the realm of institutional psychiatry, dalliances with sundry radical political movements, and brief rein as likely heir to Jacques Lacan. Many are likely seeking in UIQ both the UFO and the WTF. Guattari is most famous for his collaborations with philosopher Gilles Deleuze, especially the two volumes of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia series. Guattari fans tend to be versed in concepts of schizoanalysis, transversality, institutionality, and groupuscules. The book contains a thorough and extremely helpful introduction from translators Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson…followed by the screenplay Guattari wrote for a science fiction film he also tried to finance and get produced (!). What is perhaps most disarming about the screenplay is that its infiltration or infestation of a kind of trash culture telegraphs that its author has thoroughly assimilated tropes and archetypes of said culture. Well, we know how much Wittgenstein loved his detective novels after all. It is not only that Guattari has written a screenplay for a science fiction movie beholden to popular templates, he enthusiastically pursues a certain level of crassness in so doing: the fundamental vapidity of much of the dramatic construction, characters reduced crudely to types, silly Hollywood-style set-pieces, and often outrageously boorish dialogue, et cetera. We might chose to borrow from the Situationists and suggest that Guattari is engaged in a kind of détournement of popular cinematographic spectacle, but as I hinted at earlier I think that this screenplay, which essentially depicts a kind of destabilizing infiltration, also fundamentally aspires to represent one. It all starts with the UIQ itself, the Infra-quark Universe, an infinitesimal universe immanent to our own; the film depicts, following a breach between realms occasioned by way of experimental happenstance, “the volatile contamination it will instigate," per the Introduction, "between the human, animal and machine realms.” A group of squatters functioning as a kind of provisional cooperative make contact with UIQ, releasing its dormant potentiality and precipitating crisis. The squatters nominally constitute an exemplary groupuscule, notwithstanding that their representation speaks to the aforementioned appropriation of crass commercial culture tropes, and the UIQ represents a collectivizing field of potentiality. In his synopsis, Guattari calls the UIQ itself “a manifold entity that calls into question the very notion of the individual.” UIQ itself puts it the following way, communicating through a screen: “You see, in what you call my Infra-quark Universe, there is no axiomatic system establishing polar distinctions of the type you-me.” UIQ becomes infatuated with one of the squatters and goes berserk. It’s the climax of the would-be film. Confronted with its own jealousy, UIQ issues the most Lacanian statement imaginable: “Jealous? Je loss?” Stratified within the human network, UIQ experiences something like the trauma of the mirror stage. In a beautiful and hilarious bit of writing that at the same time captures so much of what is self-consciously ridiculous here, the character Steve, supposedly a former NASA engineer, tries to reason with UIQ: “I don’t know how it goes down in your universe but here on planet Earth, love is always the kind of weird-ass shit that drives a motherfucker crazy.”

Silver Fragments

1. At a certain point in the past decade zany and orotund seriocomic American novelist Stanley Elkin, a victim of chronic illness and gone since 1995, has risen to the very top echelon for me and I think I prize only Robert Coover higher in the whole of the American Lit pantheon, sea to shining sea, forever may your barge ride large. Elkin likened his own work and process to those of his friend William H. Gass and Saul Bellow, Lion of Letters, a Jewish and American writer like Elkin, though technically he was born in Montreal. Elkin feels a fraternal bond with Gass and Bellow because he believes they are the three of them above all “stylists.” In truth, they are to a man veritable pontiffs of style, its ne plus ultra. A few years back I found myself returning to Saul Bellow, a man whose writing I had not appraised since I was a teenager, and even then merely by way of having read but a single book. Obviously, all writers have a style and establish means to work their stye out within adaptable parameters (form, plotting, structural conceits, full-on architectural overview), but what Elkin means when he dishes us up stylists is that some literary artists are unusually attentive to the possibilities of language and the marvellous balletic performances that can be engineered sentence to sentence when writing down sentences is your chosen way of life. If Bellow is not a brass band blowing the roof off the joint to quite the extent Elkin is, there can be no denying that both writers will tend to present the reader with a highly-idiomatic scree of superhuman language pizzaz and infectious bonhomie. Again, Elkin dealt with chronic illness his whole life, and yet he’s somehow the jolliest prose stylist I’ve ever read. Bellow and Elkin are writers attentive to the joys of language as well as of much else native to bittersweet life. Language is immanent to and proper to life lived by human animals and other kinds too. Idiomatic language humanizes through comedy, absurdity, and pathos. A person is not fired in a Saul Bellow yarn, they are given the “shove-ho.” If you’ve never read it, you should do yourself a favour and scoop a copy of his third and most widely-beloved novel The Adventures of Augie March, a Chicago-and-beyond Bildungsroman whose author and protagonist both have so much get-up-and-go you almost worry about coinciding cardiac events. Social mobility, the sensibility born of good-humoured ironic opposition, Napoleon’s legacy of a nobility promising itself available to the marginal, and the notion that a man’s destiny might well serve as his guiding principle: the novel is about Augie’s relationship with his destiny, his individual piece of the greater universal wholeness. “My mind was already dwelling on a good enough fate.” If you forget he said that there’s a pretty good chance Augie will say it again later in some whole other way. Shall we also do the proper dainty bookclub thing and pause and consider that name? Augie March. Auger, august, march, the god Mars. A beautiful little poem about destiny and its pursuit, all on its own. How might Stanley Elkin pause to offer an encompassing statement on man’s condition and the bigger picture? Well, here he is in 1987’s The Rabbi of Lud: “I atoned, not quite grieving but getting warmer and aware of the immense, twisted tonnage of complex grief in the world at any given time, in any given place, some tight amalgam of woe and rue and complicity and fear. Grief like a land mass, like the seas, complicated as weather seen from high space or the veiled, tie-dye smudge of the alloy earth itself."

2. Overwhelming pleasure, blinding divine horror, annihilating ecstasy. “The sexual act poses a threat to our being because it places no limit on experience,” writes Ken Hollings in an essay on Georges Bataille called “In the Slaughterhouse of Love.” “During the act, the body no longer has limit or definition: it is dissolved into a storm of sensations which are violently superimposed and fluctuating. The effect that this has upon our consciousness can only be expressed negatively: in terms of exclusion and absence. The contemplation of the sexual act begins and ends in darkness and silence because it is contained by a law of exclusion which operates at the extreme limits of language and lucidity.” We’re definitely somewhere in Wilhelm Reich country—this sounds like the ultimate death metal orgone blast to beat the band (the sun notwithstanding). Naturally, anybody who has ever had an orgasm should basically get it. Yukio Mishima named Georges Bataille along with Witold Gombrowicz and Pierre Klossowski, the latter a one-time friend and collaborator of Bataille’s, as among his favourite Western writers, specifying shared habits respective of “an anti-psychological delineation, anti-realism, erotic intellectualism, straightforward symbolism, and a perception of the universe hidden behind all of these, as well as many other common characteristics.” Part of the vulnerability of the sex act lies in the fact that we cannot wear masks and dissemble when we have sex the way we normally might do. For Bataille, there is in sex as in panic “a certain lacerating consciousness of distress.” Additionally, there are ideas of limit and “unbearable surpassing,” the precise way in which mysticism and debauchery become wound like serpents. Bataille’s academic specialization was anthropology and that’s where he got much of his juiciest material. Among the most astonishing and provocative examples is a short vignette called “The Dead Man” which was written in the middle of the Second World War, probably near Normandy when Bataille was suffering from tuberculosis, but was not to see publication until after his death. It depicts a frenzied collective spree, but in a hyper-fragmented mode and with an uncommon level of general ghastliness, involving a golden shower, feces, vomit, and a dwarf who happens to be a fantastically disreputable count. An act of copulation is described as “hand to hand combat, unbelievably bitter.” In the end, impassive permanence trumps transient relations on the planetary surface. Ken Hollings draws a connection between myths explored by Bataille and the discovery of “several oceanic cultures where a whole community would react to the death of their chief by entering into a prolonged period of frenzy. They gave themselves over to murder, looting, arson, and sexual excess, continuing to do so until the decaying flesh had fallen away from the dead chief’s bones. At this point normal patterns of behaviour reasserted themselves.”

3. What do we find in Bleak House, a tale told by Charles Dickens? Hypocritical society ladies with prized charities, Law as Law of Cost, crime scene protocols, cemeteries, infirmities, public hygiene, dandyism, compound interest, and death by Spontaneous Combustion (!) G.K. Chesterton asserts of Charles Dickens that with this novel called Bleak House the great author has moved away from meandering quixotic narratives and towards something much more like what fancy 20th century critics might be inclined to call “the systems novel.” “When we come to Bleak House,” writes Chesterton, “we come to vital change in artistic structure. The thing is no longer a string of incidents; it is a cycle of incidents. It returns upon itself; it has recurrent melody and poetic justice; it has artistic constancy and artistic revenge. It preserves the unities; even to some extent it preserves the unities of time and place. The story circles round two or three symbolic places; it does not go straggling irregularly all over England like one of Mr. Pickwick’s coaches. People go from one place to another place; but not from one place to another place on the road to everywhere else.” I have always thought of human culture as analogous to ongoing weather systems and in a way I think of the “cycle of incidents,” especially as here theorized, as a kind of weather. What Chesterton means to index later by “sinister and unnatural vapour” is verily obviously the famous London fog, a comforting and renowned return visitor throughout the Dickens corpus, huffing and puffing and blowing its showy smoke. Is it not the absence of a fixed, univocal, and coherent perceptible field, no matter how exhaustive the vision, that ultimately finds its analogical equivalent in that great fog of fogs? Doesn’t this sound fishily like the most postmodern shit you ever heard? Please, don’t even get me started on Miguel de Cervantes and Laurence Sterne. Was it always postmodern? I don’t know, was was ever was? The systems novel has ascended to a plateau where it can address chaos theory, the second law of thermodynamics, and something soon to be known as quantum entanglement as least once we’ve gotten to the supreme Austrian modernist Hermann Broch (1886-1951), who writes in Sleepwalkers that “there are irrational forces, that they are effective, and that their very nature impels them to attach themselves to a new organon of values, to a total system which in the eyes of the Church can be no other than that of the Antichrist.” Sounds like more weather to me. Forces of industrial, military, and broadly institutional modernization set in motion acceleration and entropy. What will they have left behind to speak for them? Open pit mines, a sea full of trash, atomization and diminishment of neurological capabilities, a less and less habitable planet, mass extinction. Let us be grateful then that Broch has a sober and practicable precept for us: "we feel the totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives.”

4. Anne F. Garréta was the first woman ever admitted to Oulipo, or the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, a loose and fairly informal guild originally kick-started by Raymond Queneau whose mandate was to bind enterprising literary renegades set on using mathematical and other formula as well as generative constraints in order to produce literary compositions of varying length. Garréta’s debut novel Sphinx is not only a jaw-dropping masterpiece, it is uncannily congruent with Oulipo methodologies (though she would not be affiliated with the organization for some while yet). Sphinx is engineered from a constraint that makes it both a groundbreaking work of generqueer literature and an impressive feat: it tells a love story to whose two central participants no gender is allocated, tricky to pull of especially in the original French, a language whose grammar is intricately gendered. Somehow, I like Garréta’s subsequent novel Not One Day even more than Sphinx. If Sphinx formulated and compounded an amorous relationship unmoored from fixed gender binaries but nonetheless imperilled by inflexible polarities of dominance and subjection (as in many a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Not One Day reflects upon years and many lovers, elaborating a "rhetoric of desire," revealing an author who has found herself in wavering and variable roles insofar as her couplings and close calls have been concerned, and who has come to possess a fairly untroubled grasp of the special tenuousness of human connection. Both Sphinx and Not One Day made me think of Roland Barthes' A Lover’s Discourse, Sphinx most especially because of the passages in which the author presents a profusion and enumeration of rites of amorous agony whereas in Not One Day it’s about the attention, doting, ritual, and enumeration. Not One Day also made me think of Chantal Akerman's 1982 film Toute une nuit, a probable influence on Garréta and major personal favourite that I finally got to see on the big screen the last time I was in London. Akerman’s film depicts multiple fragmentary encounters between numerous pairs of lovers or possible lovers. In the "Ante Scriptum" which prefaces Not One Day, the author lays out the contours of the project she has set for herself: she is to spend five hours on each brief section over a set span of time, not using notes or in any way preparing things in advance, working solely from memory and in-the-moment inspiration, in order to record reminiscences on either lovers, women she desired, or women who desired her. The sections are to be written in no prescribed order, merely as things come to her, the women depicted in each given a brief code name (E*, D*, Z*, etc.), the sections finally arranged alphabetically by name of corresponding female subject. The sections are named for the night they were written in the sequence of composition, but appear in a different order, hence the scrambled index at the front of the book. Garréta: “Writing at the whim of memory twists and turns on uncertainty. Like desire itself, never assured of its end or its object.” The book’s core ten sections of reminiscence are beautifully crafted and invigorating, filled to the brim with indelible, poignant, sometimes irreverent images. The author of Not One Day is the furthest possible thing from a dilettante, signalling her specialized knack by briefly comparing novels to cars: "any amateur mechanic knows upon initial inspection the type, its most common pathologies, and the structure of its engine. There are a few common models, a minuscule amount of rare ones that force you to revise your understanding, oblige you to dismantle them completely to understand their workings. We encounter more family sedans on the roads of literature than Ferraris or prototypes.”

5. Philippe-Paul de Ségur served as Napoleon’s aide-de-camp during the infamous and fantastically disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia by the enterprising Emperor and his Grande Armée, consisting as that behemoth was at outset of more than half a million men. Ségur would publish his firsthand account of the debacle in 1824, over a decade after the events themselves transpired, the Emperor having in fact been dead for about three years. The original printings of Ségur’s account would rapidly sell out and the book would quickly be translated into all the languages then operative in Europe. Many took exception to some of the facts, deeming certain elements exaggerated. Ségur would even fight (and win) a duel over the veracity of his testimonial. His grandson would introduce an abridged version of the text in the late 19th century. Philippe Paul de Ségur came from a wealthy and connected French family left impoverished in the wake of the French Revolution (his father having narrowly avoided arrest), and as a young man he had fledgling literary aspirations on which at first he failed to make good. Finding himself temperamentally disposed to a military career, he quickly rose up the ranks in Napoleon’s forces, finding himself a trusted intimate of the leader. Ségur was present as Napoleon remade Europe, triumphing in one brazen military campaign after another, seizing territory and placing functionaries in important leadership roles hither and yon. Russia would be the first time the Emperor disastrously overextended himself and would mark the beginning of his legendary downfall. Ségur’s account of this epic folly is written with considerable literary verve, setting out to both make and unmake myth, and the author himself serves as detached commentator, entirely removed from the events as active agent. Not only did Napoleon lose Russia, he lost the near entirety of his overwhelmingly massive army. Both Napoleon and Hitler failed to heed the warnings of advisors of sound sense because their previous impossible triumphs had conditioned them to believe themselves infallible. Like Napoleon, Hitler would himself conquer much of Europe, finding himself opposed to both England and Russia, and would see Russia as the latest of a series of strategic dominoes, a prelude to direct confrontation with Great Britain. Also like Napoleon, whose disaster he knew all too well but nonetheless failed to avoid repeating, Hitler would face a Russian strategy of strategic retreat and scorched earth. Military leaders have continued to fail to heed the warning, especially when they overvalue the efficacy of shock and awe within the context of asymmetrical warfare. Philippe Paul de Ségur, elegiac for the moment: “So great expeditions are crushed by their own weight. Human limits had been exceeded. Napoleon’s genius, seeking to transcend time, climate, and distance, had as it were got lost in space. Great as his capacities were, he had gone beyond them.”

Golden Fragments

1. Some authors complete significant literary works or appear to have completed them shortly before they take their own lives. How this all plays out case by case is invariably far from a simple matter, tending no doubt also to vary from instance to instance. David Foster Wallace seems to have left the manuscript for The Pale King intending for it to be published. I happen to think it’s the best work he ever did, but it is all about the demoralization and spiritual atrophy poisoning the 21st century. At any rate, all relevant intelligence would seem to indicate that as far as Wallace was concerned the work was for all intents and purposes complete. The case with Yasunari Kawabata’s Dandelions, published posthumously in 1972, seems a little thornier. There appear to remain some who surmise that Kawabata’s death was accident rather than suicide, that he did not intend to gas himself. Others point to his depression, his tendency to privately ruminate on his own death, and the profound affect upon him of his friend Mishima’s suicide two years before Kawabata would himself die. The novel left unfinished on account of suicide invites us to go hunting for clues, shimmering fragments of a nest of defeats. I think we want to find them and that we don’t. Perhaps we hope both to be comforted and shook-by-the-collar upset. Dandelions doesn't seem to present the ideal vehicle for such grim and morbid pursuits. There was already Kawabata’s tendency to tinker protractedly, revising his own work over and over on an ongoing basis. His novels tended to take shape over time as he found ways to unify disparate stories that had been published hither and thither. At the heart of the human condition lies for Kawabata teleological perplexity, and this perplexity about reality and aberrations of reality, distortions and torsions, correlates with what some commentators perceive as his final novel’s supposed incompleteness, a crime and indignity more properly placed upon the shoulders of God than upon any given gaggle of novelists. With a situation akin to that of Dandelions, what we have, to my mind, is a novel that has its ending plotted-out a piori and then lands it like one fierce competitor indeed, flawlessly and precisely and ever so very, very nicely, right where it was intended to go off from the get-go. General misrule may often prove the house of charms. Behold: the alarming but ever-so-easy coming and going of an only-sometimes-grounded self, identity there and then not there, elastic and pried open and mortified. That the one you love may be there and not meaningfully see you anymore or that you may yourself clumsily misplace your capacity to know or identify or not be horrified at the physical presence of the now-menacing one you ever-so-recently adored more than any other. Dandelions is philosophically and emotionally congruent with the depiction and literary circumlocution of ‘Capgras syndrome’ in the 2006 novel Echo Maker by Richard Powers. Often directly preceded by a physical brain injury, somebody suffering from ‘Capgras syndrome’ will typically believe that one particular person very close to them is now a fake or an imposter. 

2. Fernando Pessoa was five years younger than his contemporary Franz Kafka and lived just over a decade longer. It is perhaps to my discredit that I have long thought of each man as an awkward and solitary bachelor with an office job who practiced his craft as a writer in something like a kind of total isolation. Pessoa, in fact, published and translated quite widely, existing in fertile dialogue with a great many of his contemporaries. I think the primary reason we think of Pessoa as a writer discovered after his death is simply because of the fact that the bulk of his most important work, his magnum opus The Book of Disquiet included, was indeed discovered in a trunk or trunks following his demise from what were likely complications related to alcoholism. Pessoa wrote both prose and poetry under a wide-ranging array of pen names. He referred to these adopted names as heteronyms rather than pseudonyms because these names did not merely serve as covers or buffers but rather belonged to comprehensively-envisioned virtual personages. In Pessoa, a deep and genuine belief in actually existing fairies goes so far as to demonstrate that said green fairies have in fact written a large part of the ailing author’s body of work...which you now hold open on your lap. Pessoa even worked out astrological charts for some of his heteronyms. "Each of us is more than one person, many people," The Book of Disquiet has it, "a proliferation of our one self.” If there is any precedent for Pessoa's creation of multiple and extremely diverse heteronyms, it is probably to be found in the lives and writing of Stendhal and Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard literally wrote books whose authorship was attributed to fictional persons. It would appear that Stendhal for the most part just liked to fuck with people.

3. “Round Naumburg pressed the black Thüringer Wald, the Thuringian forest,” writes Sue Prideaux in I am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche, “Germany’s ur-forest with its tombs of ancient heroes, dragon caves, dolmens and dark abysses that from the earliest days of German myths symbolized the irrationality and uncontrollability of the German subconscious. Wagner would appropriate it for Wotan’s mental journey toward embracing chaos, resulting in the destruction of the old order through the death of the gods and the cancelation of all the old contracts.” For the brief time they were close and amicable, Nietzsche saw Wagner both as a surrogate father and as a Dionysus, a demon, and a destroyer of worlds. In his introduction to the 2019 New Directions edition of Clarice Lispector’s 1949 novel The Besieged City, Benjamin Moser allots ample space to the consideration of unhorsing, or "obyezloshadenie," a term borrowed from Isaac Babel, who had employed it originally with reference to the replacement of horses by motors within both rural and urban contexts during the process of industrial modernization. If one stops to consider the matter, it quickly becomes clear that the theme of unhorsing is a prevalent one in the art and culture of the early 20th century. My tendency is to immediately think of both the 1918 Booth Tarkington novel The Magnificent Ambersons and the absolutely divine, even if irreparably studio-butchered, 1942 Orson Welles film adaptation of same, his second feature and a passion project. Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin consciously borrows an image I think from former Italian fascist Curzio Malaparte and his book Kaputt. Malaparte saw much more of the Second World War than he would have liked, assuredly. The critical image in question from 2007’s My Winnipeg and its marketing: the heads of dead horses, macabre tableau, their visages twisted and agonized, frozen, jutting out of the ice.

4. It was a long time ago now for sure, but I am confident that I can go ahead and make the definitive claim that I fell in heedless and wholly unavailing love with star for the ages, occasional movie actress, and beaming ball of bouncy energy Lillian Roth, who is long dead and who I shall therefore almost certainly never meet, the first time I watched 1929 Ernst Lubitsch musical and early talkie The Love Parade. When I looked her up I realized I had also seen her in 1930’s Animal Crackers, the second film by and featuring the Marx Brothers, vaudeville’s greatest anarchist geniuses. When I found out that Roth had written a famous and highly-successful-in-it’s-day autobiography entitled I’ll Cry Tomorrow, I tracked an old hardcover down on eBay. It’s a lovely and intimate book but it gets extremely dark. Lillian Roth was at one time a very famous child star on Broadway… and then a all-too-famous recovering alcoholic. From approximately 1930 to 1946 Roth lived through again and again in a spiral the devastating indignities of active alcoholism, a progressive and ultimately fatal disease concerning which I have all too intimate a working knowledge. Roth’s nightmare lasted about sixteen years. Published in 1954, I’ll Cry Tomorrow became a bestseller worldwide and sold more than seven million copies in twenty languages. In 1955 it was adapted into a glitzy Hollywood movie and Susan Hayward was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the role of Lillian Roth. In 1953, Roth, who was then eking out a modest living doing club and lounge dates here and there, living with Burt, her sixth husband, in Florida, was invited to do an episode of the popular television show This is Your Life. It played extremely well with home audiences. All the while little Lillian wanted to be a good Jewish girl and to please her parents, though adulation wouldn’t make her any less crushed and crumpled up and she knew it better than anybody else around her ever did or appeared to. At the heart of it all, and in spite of her meteoric rise, Lillian is beset by a constant sense of deep personal inadequacy. This is the crux of alcoholic grandiosity: I am worthless, defective, but I need top billing, my name in lights. Not long after I read I’ll Cry Tomorrow, I happened to catch 1933’s Ladies They Talk About over on the Criterion Channel as part of a pre-code Barbara Stanwyck bundle. Young Lillian is in it. She has the only musical number. My God. What an extraordinary young woman. Damn it, that kid should be proud of herself.

5. The writer Italo Svevo lived and worked in Trieste, at one time a major Austro-Hungarian port city placed smack dab along the coast of Italy, and he studied widely in both German and Italian, apparently demonstrating noteworthy capabilities in the process. Italo grew up loving the theatre. He published his first article in 1880, its title “Shylock,” a fact notable in that the author is a Jew living in what is basically Italy. He had some success in business, especially after having married well, his in-laws overseeing an international firm specializing in submarine paints (!). Svevo wrote and self-published two novels in the 1890s to no fanfare, this apparently dissuading him from continuing to serve his literary métier with anything like gusto for a considerable period thereafter. No longer a young man, Svevo would go on to employ an English tutor to help him flourish in international business. The impecunious Irishman, temporarily living in Trieste with his wife Nora, was a fella by the name of James Joyce. Mr. Joyce would come in time to change everything for Svevo, ultimately helping to turn the third novel of his pal from Trieste, self-published and ignored in Italy just as the previous two had been, into a great overnight sensation in Paris.